Cosmotronic Messor

Stereo Compressor and Transient Shaper

Messor is an analog stereo compressor with lots of tricks up its sleeve, in only 8HP.
From squashing drums, sidechaining kicks and sculpting transients, to glueing a mix together, it's a very versatile dynamics manager.

At its core it's a VCA based feed-forward compressor with a low noise signal path. The magic is in the internal sidechain that shapes the gain reduction envelope. This starts with a a switchable high-pass / low-pass filter, before going into a precision envelope follower, controlled by familiar parameters: the attack, release, threshold, ratio and makeup gain.

The ratio can go past limiting and into over-compression, which can completely reshape transients, a great tool for sound design.

Being modular, of course there are CV inputs for Attack, Release and the side-chain Filter cutoff. The Gain CV controls the makeup gain, but also doubles as a Stereo VCA with the Gain knob turned fully CCW.

The gain reduction envelope is also available as an output, for turning filters or other VCA's into compressors for example, or as a standalone envelope follower.

There's a bypass switch, and a Warm mode, that can bring in a bit of additional saturation and compression in the form of analog tube simulation circuitry.
Lastly there's the possibility to insert an external sidechain, for that classic kick sidechain compression.